Retail and Hospitality

Case Study:

Oxfam

4 June 2007

Oxfam is one of the UK's most active charities, raising a gross income of over £253m in the 2004-2005 fiscal year. Like any charity, Oxfam is understandably conservative when it comes to expenditure and relies heavily on the use of IT to operate as efficiently and cost effectively as possible.

It uses PeopleSoft to provide applications for logistics, finance and project management. With a large international presence, one of Oxfam's challenges is the delivery of these applications to remote locations, often with very limited bandwidth, and in troubled areas. To help overcome the challenges of backing up and restoring an ever-growing database, while ensuring a high level of availability to users worldwide, Oxfam turned to Quest Software.

The data for the PeopleSoft application is held in a series of SQL Server databases. Although the production database holds the live data, a number of additional copies of the database are typically required - and are used for development, quality assurance and training purposes. As the volume of live data increases over time, the size of additional copies expands at the same rate as they are refreshed. This not only increases the amount of storage required, but also the length of backup and restore times during nightly housekeeping activity.

Oxfam initially used native Windows file compression and PKZIP to reduce the size of the daily backups to disk, which are then copied to LTO tapes. "As a charity, we expect to take on some levels of administrative pain in the interests of lowering our operational costs, but as data expanded, we were spending increasing amounts of time finding space on the network for our backups, " says Jason Oldroyd, technical support manager, Oxfam.

"The cost of storage is getting cheaper, and, as a charity, we get good discounts from our vendors. What was more pressing was the increasing amount of time we were spending on managing our storage. For instance, our database refresh processes were taking around half a day. Although this did not affect our critical production environment, it did impact the training environment and therefore the end users," explains Oldroyd.

Oxfam surveyed the market in search of a suitable solution and had made the decision to evaluate LiteSpeed from Quest Software. At around this time, one of Oxfam's DBAs had submitted an article to a SQL Server Internet technical forum, which won Article of the Month. By chance, the prize was a copy of LiteSpeed.

"We were getting 10:1 compression, and the process didn't require any additional space," comments Oldroyd. "More importantly, the backup and restore time savings were more than adequate for our needs. On this basis, Oxfam purchased additional licences of LiteSpeed to manage the SQL Server databases for its entire PeopleSoft environment."

"LiteSpeed has reduced our daily housekeeping by 50 percent, from six to three hours, increasing international availability and keeping track with demand," explains Oldroyd.

"Using LiteSpeed, our production database now takes only 20 minutes to back up and 90 minutes to restore, which is twice as fast as when the database was half its current size. These times are far more acceptable and will ensure minimal disruption to our critical PeopleSoft applications, so Oxfam's emergency relief efforts do not suffer," explains Oldroyd.

By using LiteSpeed, Oxfam has realised storage savings of approximately 90 percent. "When we went live in 1999, our production database was only two gigabytes. When you consider that this database is now 110 gigabytes in size and that our total environment is around 10 times that size with the various copies, the savings on disk, tape, time and overall management are significant, thanks to LiteSpeed. It would now be very hard to function without it," notes Oldroyd.